Why Rod Dreher Really Isn't Wild About the Woodrow Wildcats

My last few dog-walking tours over the weekend have revealed to me that Rod Dreher, editorial writer at The Dallas Morning News, is the New Great Satan of Old East Dallas and Lakewood. I think I’m jealous.

He pointed out that the campaign is aimed at white people, which it is, and then he went on to describe Woodrow as two schools: a white one and a minority one, which it is. In fact, I was all with him for the first half of his piece. But Dreher then veered off into a take that I can only describe as painfully convoluted and racially neurotic.

He seemed to be painting a picture of the white people who send their kids to Woodrow as somehow racist, because their kids are mainly in the advanced placement classes and the kids of color are mainly not. Then he twists off again into a thing about how the white families at Woodrow seem to think white folks like Dreher are chicken-shits. He quotes the Woodrow principal as saying, "Parents choose private schools out of fear."

And then ... I guess … look, his piece is very difficult to follow because, like a lot of what he writes, it doesn’t have a consistent logical thread. But he seems to be saying that Woodrow parents aren’t so great, either, because Woodrow is internally segregated.

At this point in any discussion of Woodrow I need to make full disclosure of a potential conflict of interest in my personal situation: I personally think Dreher is an idiot.

But let me say this about that. The Woodrow-Lakewood parents are an odd interesting mixed bag. Some of them are very progressive: Woodrow has the wonderful Ballet Folklorico program in part because white Lakewood parents pushed for it, knowing that the school’s extracurricular programs could not and should not go on being all-white.

But lots of Lakewooders are less than progressive about it too. They’ve been going to the school for generations. I don’t think some of them are especially liberal. It’s more like, “By God, that’s our school, and if they want to take it away from us, they’ll have to pry this moldy Wildcats banner out of our cold dead heads.”

Frankly, in the long run, in terms of who will stay the course in the long battle for diversity and progress, I’m gonna bet on those clammy-handed Bobcat dead-enders every time.

So what does this all come down to? Easy. I can tell you. Woodrow is 18 percent white. It’s 12 percent black kids, some from newer apartment complexes in East Dallas, some from the very toughest stuff in South Dallas down where Dolphin Road becomes Hatcher Street. And it’s 68 percent Mexican kids, many of whom are recent immigrants within the last few years from Guanajuato and other central Mexican states.

There’s gang stuff, but there also are a lot of poor, hard-working serious families of all ethnic stripes, very much including poor whites.

And there are a bunch of white kids there, many of them middle-class, some rich, and they go on to Stanford and UVA and Yale and the University of Dallas and UT and Austin College and A&M and Kansas and OU and all kinds of cool places.